The arrival this month of the first batches of British-designed and made Iyonix computers represents a bold attempt to revive the Acorn computer market - and with it the embers of a once illustrious domestic personal computing industry that runs from Sinclair, through Apricot and Amstrad to Psion.
The Acorn market has been in slow decline since 1999 when the company was dismembered so shareholders could cash in on its shareholding in the chipmaker Arm.
Despite efforts of a group of distributors and developers to try to rescue the market - rebranded as Risc OS, after the name of the operating system - initial optimism began to fade as promised new, more powerful machines failed to materialise.
Then out of the blue, Castle Technology, the Suffolk-based developer that still makes the existing Acorn range under licence, announced it would be demonstrating its all-new Iyonix at the annual Risc OS show, prior to shipping at the beginning of December. It expects to sell 500 machines at £1,299 (including VAT, but excluding monitor) to the existing user base before Christmas.
At the core of the system is a new Castle-designed motherboard (also built in UK), which gets rid of the restrictions of old, slow Acorn proprietary subsystems, such as the video chip and memory data bus, giving substantial performance improvements.
There is also a new Arm-compatible Intel Xscale processor, clocked at 600Mhz - twice that of the ageing StrongArm in the Risc PC, Acorn's last machine. Industry standard PCI and USB interfaces also offer a great - and cheaper - range of peripherals.
One great advantage of Arm-designed chips is the low-power consumption, which means less heat and less need for noisy fans. Jack Lillingston of Castle describes the Iyonix as "virtually silent" - a key factor for some market sectors.
But is it all worth it? There are almost certainly many tens of thousands of Acorn machines still in use, but the active user base - those upgrading, spending money - is probably less than 10,000.
First of all it has to be said there is an element of sentiment. Many people grew up using BBC/Acorn machines and still value its genuine sense of community - and it represents two fingers up to the world domination of Microsoft.
But few people spend money on sentiment. What keeps people using their machines is its user-friendly operating system. When it was introduced in the late 1980s, it was well ahead of its time. It sported a true graphical user interface, was mouse-driven, had an icon bar (Windows caught up in 95), drag and drop operation within and between programmes, and saveable desktops, so you can start with the programmes and files you want automatically loaded.
There was no scripting, and as it is held in read-only memory chips on the motherboard, rather than on disc, if the system did crash it was - and is - quick and easy to reboot.
In fact the operating system itself is far from under threat. It has hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. You may well be using a version of it every day without realising it, particularly if you use an Arm-based PDA or set top box from Pace. That company now owns the Risc OS rights, and has also widely licensed it in areas such as consumer electronics and telecoms.
There is now even an emulator, Virtual Acorn (£29 inc VAT), which comes with several applications programmes and runs on Windows machines.
It will be hard after four years treading water for the Risc OS computer market to make a comeback. But with another hardware developer, Halifax-based MicroDigital, promising another Xscale-based machine soon, and software developers queuing up to upgrade their programmes to run on Iyonix, there's great optimism among the band of enthusiasts who have stuck with it.
There could still be a niche for this enterprising and innovative homegrown technology.
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